What is NameCoin (NMC)? A Detailed Review

NameCoin was the first cryptocurrency that forked Bitcoin. In general, this service is focused on providing the registration of domain names. It means that just the way you create a website with a .com or .io domain, you may register one with a .bit using the NameCoin network. It is impenetrable for any types of user activity monitoring and censorship.

How does it work?

The traditional domain names services (DNS) are or may be covered by governmental control. For example, Chinese government is able to block any website around the country. NameCoin dedicates efforts to preventing censorship on the web. The idea of company members is to adopt the blockchain technology and distribute DNS among the users, who participate in a general network, to avoid any interruptions of the administrative authorities.

There is a well-known problem in naming consent for a protocol known as Zooko’s triangle. It claims that member names can have no more than 2 out of 3 of the following features: being human-meaningful, secure, and decentralized. As for Bitcoin, it implements decentralization and security, however, has nothing to do with being meaningful.

Initial NameCoin’s aim was to solve this problem. Being a Bitcoin’s fork, it provides safety and decentralization and includes an additional stratum to provide human-readable names. The network combines names (personalities) with an ID and authentication protocol. With the help of this unique ID, one can access the ID-enabled site with NameCoin identity.

Dot-Bit DNS

NameCoin client allows users to get an access to Dot-Bit sites. Dot-Bit DNS may be explained as a decentralized online phone book. Governmental control can influence the traditional DNS (phone book) and block particular websites (numbers) as they prefer. To overcome this, Dot-Bit distributes the numbers to all members of the network. With that, no authority can control the sites (numbers) if they are not their owners.

Standard DNS systems has a lot of disadvantages comparing to Dot-Bit. The key plus is an ability to resist all kinds of censorship, which is the most important feature of a blockchain technology.

Dot-Bit utilizes free HTTPS, which adds even more security. It means that users have more privacy when they browse the web. The Dot-Bit DNS is stored on your PC and therefore it takes less than a second to load the websites, which is even faster than loading traditional ones.

How to use Dot-Bit?

You have to download both NameCoin client and NMControl. Once you launch them, you will be able to surf Dot-Bit sites using any application, including (but not limited to) web browsers.

The domains can be created and registered with the help of NameCoin client by entering the website’s name and the DNS server you were hosting it before.

Bitcoin relation

Besides being the first Bitcoin’s fork, NameCoin is also the first source of merged mining. Due to this technology, you can mine both BTC and NMC at the same time. Therefore, NameCoin uses the hash power provided by Bitcoin and stays on its own independent blockchain.

NameCoin’s codebase strives to stay similar to Bitcoin’s. The main difference between them is the specific NameCoin’s feature known as identity registration.